THE CAUCUS; The Social Network: A Hackathon (No, Not the Budget)

By JENNIFER PRESTON

Published: November 18, 2011

While House Republican and Democratic leaders are finding it difficult to agree on spending cuts, they are coming together next month for Capitol Hill's first-ever Facebook Hackathon. The goal is to find new ways to use the social network to make information about the legislative process more transparent and to help members of the public more easily engage with lawmakers.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican leader, and Representative Steny H. Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland and his party's whip, are co-hosting the event, scheduled for Dec. 7 at the Capitol, which will include Facebook engineers, independent software developers, advocates for the open data movement and members of Congress.

Hackathon is a term used to describe an event where programmers come together to build applications in a collaborative process.

''There is a lot of opportunity to improve the process,'' said Matt Lira, digital director for Mr. Cantor. ''We are going to sit down in a bipartisan way and look at how we can tackle some of these problems. We are hoping to get as many engineers as possible. They will have a unique opportunity to help make democracy work better.''

The idea for the hackathon grew out of a meeting at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., in September, whenMr. Cantor and two other House Republican leaders were interviewed by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, for a webcast and discussed how they might be able to use Facebook to more effectively open up the legislative process for the public.

At the start of the 112th Congress in January, the House made electronic documents a priority, to help increase transparency. This has led to the creation of new standards for data kept by the House and its committees so that it can be presented online in a way that allows developers to build applications. Posting an image of a legislative document, for example, is not useful because the data cannot be easily accessed.

Mr. Lira that the House was working to make data accessible online to developers, who could then build apps that would allow the public to use the data in a variety of ways. He said social media also offered opportunities for outreach, particularly because more and more people turn to these tools for information and to communicate. In the last two years, the number of members of Congress using Twitter, Facebook, other social networks and mobile applications has exploded.

John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that is an advocate for open government, praised the House for showing initiative in embracing the developer community to connect people with information about their representatives and legislation. Bu,t he said, ''It's far more important that the House ensures its data is online in a timely fashion.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia is one of the hosts of an event bringing Facebook engineers to Congress. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP SCOTT ANDREWS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)